Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist and writer whose work engages with the legacies of imperial violence. She uses film and video to explore narratives of belonging outside of geographies and temporalities, that both unsettle our sense of home and continuously make our places of affinity uninhabitable. Gelare has exhibited internationally and is an editor of “MARCH: a journal of art and strategy.”
GELARE KHOSHGOZARAN
April 2–May 14, 2022
Gelare Khoshgozaran’s film installation Royal Debris (2022) is informed by her decade-long research about the shuttered former Embassy of Iran in Washington D.C. Located at 3005 Massachusetts Ave N.W., the vacant building embodies a contradiction: it is a ruin due to its deteriorating condition caused, in large part, by the ongoing US sanctions on Iran, and it is privileged with an exceptional protection thanks to its ‘foreign mission’ status. Taking the building’s symbolic and material status as its departure point, Khoshgozaran’s film is a rumination on borders, displacement and ruination through excursions into family history, architecture, poetry and contemporary art.
Royal Debris brings together several works that implicate the viewer in a continuous sense of displacement between a diasporic home and an institutional archive. A bespoke persian rug was designed to incorporate the flora and fauna foraged from in and around the buildings of the former Embassy and Consulate General of Iran, respectively in Washington DC and New York City. The style of the included Ottoman footstools were identified by Khoshgozaran from the archival photographs of the former embassy’s “Persian Room.” The viewing experience of the film is distorted by a custom designed chandelier hanging from the ceiling, creating a dispersive refraction of the moving image throughout the space of the gallery. The installation thinks through the production of a space that is conditioned by the limitations of an archive, its artificiality, and its simultaneous order and disorder.
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This project could not be possible without the support of: Hande Sever, Hugo Cervantes, Hailey Loman and Los Angeles Contemporary Archives, Aria Safar and Mehrshid Alai-Safar, Andrea Steves, Shiva Balaghi, Mona Kareem, Los Angeles String Quartet and Felix Vologanin, Azin Seraj, Jimena Sarno, Sina Fakour, Saeed Khoshgozaran and Parvaneh Madani, Alexandre Saden, Jake Viator, and musicians Ariana Solotoff, Enosh Kofler, Boryana Popova, and Mark Bassett.
The research for Royal Debris was supported by the Graham Foundation.
The project was funded, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
Artist talk with Gelare Khoshgozaran
GELARE KHOSHGOZARAN
April 30, 2022
2pm PST
Via Zoom; RSVP to info@artspeak.ca for link access.
On the occasion of her film installation Royal Debris (2022), on view at Artspeak until May 14, 2022, artist Gelare Khoshgozaran will join us virtually to speak about her practice.
A Ruin Is More than the Sum of Its Debris
Title: A Ruin Is More than the Sum of Its Debris
Series Title: Beacon – a series in ten issues
Artist: Gelare Khoshgozaran
Writer: Shiv Kotecha
Series Editor: Bopha Chhay
Design: Vicky Lum
Proofreader: Alexandra Bischoff
Publisher: Artspeak
Printed by: Metropolitan Fine Printers
Year Published: 2022
Cover: soft
Binding: staples
Dimensions: 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Edition of 200
ISBN: 978-1-927630-17-4
Cost: $12
Subscription: $100
‘BEACON – a pamphlet series in ten issues’ focuses on how the commitment of artists’ to wider social movements informs contemporary artistic practice. The series will feature texts by artists whose practices engage with language and visual arts.
Current issues:
01 – Ruth Buchanan
02 – Hong-Kai Wang
03 – Christina Battle
04 – Justine A. Chambers
05 – Jared Stanley and
Sameer Farooq
06 – Gelare Khoshgozaran
07 – Lana Lopsei
08 – Be Oakley
09 – Bopha Chhay
10 – Nasrin Himada